Karla Caprali

Brazilian painter Karla Caprali lets images rather than words convey her personal experiences. She takes a conceptual approach to her memories, perception, lust, and ideas about the human condition, exploiting the tension between darkness and light, color and line. Inspired by life and death, dreams and fear, religion and paganism, motherhood and daily routine, she achieves a startlingly contemporary, feminine vision of daily life and her past.

The sophistication of her intensely colored, thought-provoking, and moving paintings arises from an innate appreciation of duality. “There is no joy that tastes as sweet without the bitterness of sorrow,” she says, “and no passion that burns eternal without the cold steel hands of reality pulling it back to earth.” Her paintings may reflect symbolically a deep ambivalence about the joys and compromises that womanhood demands or encapsulate moments of empowerment. “Art for me is like a child lost in the wilderness, a ghost of life grasping for some roots to cling to